2023-05-16 05:34:00
The Federal Office of Public Health (BAG) reports the first Zika virus case since 2019 in its latest weekly bulletin. It is a so-called “imported case”. This means that the person concerned became infected abroad and then entered Switzerland.
As the BAG announced on Monday at the request of the Keystone-SDA news agency, there have never been any infections with this virus in Switzerland itself.
The office expects that more Zika cases will be reported to it as travel increases again. However, Zika transmissions have been at a low level worldwide since 2018. Since the reporting obligation began in 2016, the BAG has registered a total of 75 Zika cases.
Zika is transmitted through the bites of Aedes mosquitoes. The virus was first found in rhesus monkeys in Uganda’s Zika Forest about 70 years ago. In most cases, an infection is unremarkable. Fever, headache, and reddening of the skin can be symptoms.
Serious consequences can occur, among other things, if women become infected with Zika early in pregnancy. The infants can then develop what is known as microcephaly, a brain and skull malformation. From 2015, thousands of such malformations appeared in Brazil when the Zika epidemic hit there.
In February 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a “public health emergency of international concern”. Brazil sent tens of thousands of soldiers to fight mosquitoes. Other countries in the region were also affected.
French authorities reported in October 2019 that two people in the Var department in southern France had been infected with the Zika virus for the first time on European soil. The two people affected were not infected while traveling. The carrier of the virus was probably the Asian tiger mosquito. Both people recovered.
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